"He stood between the living and the dead and the plague stopped." Numbers 16:48

Category Archives: Reflection

It’s as though all of the frustration in the universe is bottled inside you with no release valve. You have no options. You have no moves left. And the pressure is building, threatening to destroy everything inside you, leaving you a shell of a person.

You can’t handle feeling.

You can’t stand not feeling.

It is relentless and you are stuck.

What if I told you that it’s an illusion? What if you could believe that stuck is one of the greatest tools the enemy has to keep you from understanding the freedom that comes with finding courage. What if you realized that the worst possible outcomes you can imagine are a vail of lies hanging between you and what God created you for– bravery, beauty, adventure, meaning, trust, walking on water, climbing mountains, and doing the impossible?

You can feel it can’t you?

It’s just a whisper maybe, but it’s there inside you asking you to consider what if. What if we were unafraid, what if we believed that the world belongs to God and he can and will take care of us? What if we could do what we dream of doing?

We build trust, we lose trust, we crave trust-worthiness, we look for something to trust in, we break trust, we don’t trust…

It’s as though we have emotional tentacles that are constantly reaching out in search of something solid, something to give us a guaranteed foothold for our next step in the dark.

I started thinking maybe I didn’t have a clue what trust actually was all about when I read Ruthless Trust by Brennan Manning and passages like the following sunk into a dark, quiet place in the pit of my soul that longed for something radical, something wild and untamed to take over my life,

The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise

We have this chance to take a deep breath and step into the unknown and we can’t know what trust means until we’ve actually done it. Until we’ve taken the courage to say to God, “Your will be done” and mean it. I’ve only begun to taste it and it’s unlike anything you can imagine until you’re there. It never stops being terrifying, but somehow knowing that all that has built up to create that terror in you is nothing compared to what God can do with the next moment, the next hour, the next day, month, or year. In this free-fall we begin to understand what we were created for, something reaches into the core of your being and says, “THIS IS WHAT YOU WERE DESIGNED FOR”, but it’s so hard getting to that place because everything about this world tries to tell us that that’s the last place we want to be.

I have only just begun to understand how I am designed for the explosions. I have spent so much time hiding from the bombs going off in my life, not understanding that every explosion creates something new, it makes more space for God to move and I can move with him if I can get myself to stop looking at my wounds and trying to find new places for shelter that might totally prevent further damage.

Don’t let fear back you into a corner in a world that needs your courage. Don’t be so distracted by “every day life” that you miss the many opportunities you have every day to trust God in a way that creates explosions in the world around you.

Since the beginning of the project I keep finding myself drawn back to certain passages of scripture, actually, in a lot of cases whole books of the bible.

In the last couple weeks the words “No fear in love” have been playing on repeat in my head. They’ve popped up as I’ve faced difficulty in my relationships, they’ve been echoing through my mind as I’ve listened to students tell me about different situations going on in their lives. I’ve heard those words loud and clear as I’ve thought about what life is all about and how I should be treating the guy serving my coffee or the lady bagging my groceries.

1 John 4: 18 says,

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

I’ve always thought about this verse from a first person perspective. I don’t have to be afraid when I am grounded in God’s love for me. And I believe that’s true and it’s a place to start, a jumping off point for this verse. It’s extremely important that we know ourselves through the eyes of the unconditional love God has for us. Brennan Manning says in The Raggamuffin Gospel, “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.” If we ignore internalizing how we are loved by God we inevitably will spend our entire lives trying to earn something that is already in our possession and miss God’s calling for us. Thank God for grace.

All of that said, in the last couple of weeks as the words “no fear in love” have been the background music for all of my thinking and living, I began to wonder what it would look like if I applied this verse, which I had only been applying to myself, to the way I love others. It opened up a whole world for me, which I have to admit wasn’t exactly comfortable at first.

Without intending to, I think, we practice a lot of fear in the way we “love” others. I mentioned that several days ago in this post. We have our Christian disclaimers because we’re afraid of what it will look like we condone, or believe, or have taken part of if we just love people as they are. We constantly want to spell it out for people, “I MUST REMIND YOU THAT YOU ARE A SINNER” and then we wrap ourselves in turmoil over how to relate– Do I go to the gay wedding? Do I give the homeless guy on the corner money? Do I baby-sit for the teen mom?

And most of the time we DON’T– whatever our specific question is– because we’re afraid that the most loving thing we could do will be enabling, or condoning, or supporting something that we are morally opposed to. And I get it. But I think collectively we DON’T get IT.

Over and over again the bible says, “Love God and love each other”. I don’t see anything that says to make sure we stand daily on our moral soap boxes or that it is our personal mission to convict the sinful pants off of each other. Instead of being “salt and light” we Christians seem to be in the constant business of isolating ourselves and alienating others. It’s wrong, it’s backwards and it makes zero sense if we pay any attention to Jesus.

Jesus made the first move every time. He reached out and touched the dirty, he approached the prostitute, he surrounded himself with the broken, the outcast, the rejected, and then he DIED for all of us. ALL OF US. Without any promise that we would even understand what that gift meant, without any down payment from us. He said, “You know what, they are mine, make me liable. I claim them.”

If there is no fear in love then there should be no fear in how we love others. Jesus set the bar really high, so I feel like it’s safe to say that we cannot err too far on the side of love, because love is the point. The whole entire point. What do we really think all of our “good” and “moral” insistence means if we are missing the point? St. Paul says it pretty clearly in 1 Corinthians 13,

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

If we love without fear we change the world. Because that’s what Jesus did and the more we do it, the more we become like him… “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgement: In this world we are likeJesus.” (1 John 4:16-17)

I know this is a lot.

Trust me, I’ve thought through the ramifications– it means self-sacrifice, and going out of our way, it means not caring what other people think, even other Christians, it means taking risks, taking personal hits, it means giving ourselves away… any of that sound familiar?

We can do this.

We have to do this, the world desperately needs it and so do we. I heard Rebekah Lyons say recently that anxiety is the result of unfulfilled purpose and I believe that’s true. It seems to me that the majority of the Christian community is experiencing a great deal of anxiety. Could it be because we are not fulfilling our purpose? I think so.

We’re a family who likes to be together (most of the time) and invite, well, pretty much everyone else to be with us, too. It strikes me just now that we must think we’re pretty great to think the best thing we can do for the people around us is to invite them to pull up a chair and squeeze in wherever they can.

We are kind of great.

I don’t mean to sound like a jerk, I just love how we love, as a family. The “Come be with us” attitude is something that has been passed down to my siblings and I from our parents who learned it from other people who took them in and taught them how it felt to be welcomed and to belong. My parents experienced God’s love through these people in their lives and then became God’s love for others in the way that they invited them into the family, not just to the gathering. It’s a beautiful inheritance and I treasure it.

Today I thank God for loving us in a way that makes our imperfections perfect for a broken world. Every hurt, every cut, every scrape, every flaw becomes an opening for us to feel God’s love more deeply and an opportunity for us to know how to love each other better.

There have been mountains of mistakes that have brought us to this moment and I am thankful for a God who loves to redeem.

Last night I walked across the Georgetown dam with my dad. I’ve walked across this dam literally thousands of times with my father. Miles of my life have been worked out and tears shed as we crossed the dam’s paved top overlooking the lake on one side and the city on the other. As a child I stood on this dam and watched flood waters rush around one end during one of the rainiest seasons my home town has ever seen. When I was a teenager the over-look at the end of the dam was the place to go when you were going to have a serious conversation.

This dam has been a permanent fixture in my life, steady, strong, and tall.

In 32 years, however, last night was the first time that I have ever crossed that dam in near darkness. Dad text me before I got off work and asked if I’d like to walk with him and by the time we got out there it was around 5:45pm. We walked almost the entire length of the dam and then turned around to the sight you see in the picture to the left. The road and horizon were dark, almost black, with the glow of the last rays of the setting sun burning out behind them.

It was breathtaking.

As I noticed the contrast between the dark silhouette of the hills in the distance against the orange pink of the sky and realized we were walking into that darkness I heard a quiet voice like a whisper say, “Do you trust the road?”

I wasn’t afraid of walking into those dark places on the horizon because I did trust the road. I had been walking that road since I was a little girl, I know it’s bends and curves, I know the sound it makes under my feet, I know where it rises and falls and even though the landscape on either side of the road has changed dramatically over the years of my life, the road hasn’t changed at all. Whatever might happen in those dark trees and hills ahead of me, I knew the road would lead to safety, to home, to light.

“I am the road.”

God’s words sunk into my heart with a heavy, warm, fullness like a the kind of hugs you get from your brother that squeeze the air out of your lungs, but feel gentle and protective at the same time.

I met Jesus in the backseat of my parents car when I was around 4 or 5 years old. I’ve had people question the validity of that experience, but I knowthat’s when God became a permanent fixture in my life and I have been walking his road ever since.

I haven’t walked perfectly, there have been valleys and rough places I had to climb, but just like the dam, I know the road.

I know how God feels in my life and even when I’ve had to walk through the dark places He’s never taken His love away and the road always leads to safety, to home, and to light.

I’ve come to a place in life where I know I am going to have to walk out in faith into some big unknowns in order to do what God created me to do.

The dark horizon is terrifying and I don’t know what’s in those dark trees and hills.

There’s been a lot to read about women in leadership, specifically in Christian circles and conference circuits, the last week or so. As I thought about the different sides and perspectives reflected on social networking sights and blogs it occurred to me that something seemed to be missing.

Somewhere in between the Beth Moores and Rachel Held Evans’ of the world there is a group of women who need to speak up.

Nothing against either of those women– I have learned quite a lot from both and I find myself agreeing with many things they have to say– however, I don’t feel like I belong in either of the core groups these women respresent. In fact, when I thought about it, none of the women I know seem to belong to either of those groups.

Don’t worry, I considered demographics…
The thing is, having been involved with an international organization I’ve gotten to know women all over the United States and some outside of it.
It’s not just the women in my area.

So these two sides are what stands as markers for women of faith…

On the one side the more traditional/conservative Christian women’s movement seems to declare, “This is how women should be…” and the example is the woman who has it all together. She’s a devoted wife and valiant mother. She balances grocery shopping, coffee dates, and bible studies all while looking fabulous and radiating joy. She’s the organizer, the Sunday school teacher, and she never misses her running group. These are beautiful, lovely things… and a lot to live up to.

The message of progressive Christian women, on the other side, almost insists, “This is how Christian women are…” and here the example is of the woman who is self-sufficient, politically active and hot-button savy. She is in the fray and society’s face. She is pushing the boundaries of theology, questioning centuries of church history, and her tenacity is unrivaled. Her dedication and determination are also beautiful and lovely, but a lot to live up to.

Both of these groups are vocal and passionate.
Both are valuable and yet… I don’t believe either represent the majority of Christian women. These are not the women I know, these are not the women who have spoken into my life. These examples don’t reflect the woman of faith I am or want to be. And that’s not a judgement against women for whom these examples make sense, but I do believe a big part of the picture the world sees of women of the church is missing and we need to give voice to it.

Somewhere in the middle there are those of us who are mothers just barely holding it together, wives fighting for their marriages, and single women who are neither relationship starved or desperate, but still value their relationships with men. These women believe in balance. They value tradition while they explore creativity, they are confident in their equality and don’t need it to be superiority. You won’t find them signing petitions, joining boycotts or holding picket signs. They are not activists, but they DO act– they find every opportunity to help those around them in need, they give the clothes off their backs, the food from their kitchens, and the time they would be spending asleep in their beds. They err on the side of grace, always, forever, for everyone, no matter what the situation. They look for where God is and they go there, they run, they are the first responders and do their best to honor Him by cultivating relationships that breathe His love and life into the world and affirm what is good and right. They create culture instead of placate, embrace, or rebel against it. They respect each other’s differences and hold each other up.

In the middle they hope, they pray, and sometimes they beg.
They see beauty and call it what it is.
They fight, they persevere and hold on with everything they’ve got.
They forgive what society says is unforgivable.
They stay, no matter what.
They are courageous and they know where they stand with our Creator even when they can’t stand at all, when the best they can do is crawl.
They know mercy, they long for justice, and they love so hard it hurts.

The core female church of today doesn’t have time to look a certain way or to belong to one camp or the other because she is too busy rolling up her sleeves and getting her hands dirty.

If you want to know why there aren’t more women speaking at Christian conferences, writing books or taking positions of leadership, I challenge you, take a look around in all of the least glamorous places, where the hard work that comes with little thanks gets done and you will find women of the church giving everything they’ve got.

These are not the Christian women I hear or read about, these are the women I know. These are the women who raised me, who have been there when I was the most broken, who have patiently stood beside me while I hurt, who have taught me what it means to be seen, heard, and loved by God.

This in between group needs to find its voice– for all of the other women in the world who don’t feel like they can see themselves in the current faces representing Christian women. It’s time to step out into new water, deep water, and take a risk by being vulnerable and honest in the public square.

Women are a ferocious and exquisite part of God’s image, everyone of us. It’s on us to show up, to speak up, to be heard, to think out loud. All of us, not just the groups who are already used to getting out there. No matter what our personal beliefs are about male authority in the church, we can’t keep blaming them for our absence. We have to stop waiting for them to give us openings and start taking responsibility for ourselves, for when and where and how we speak.

My prayer and hope is that we are about to see a new age for women in the church, that together, and in all of our diversity, we begin to reflect the image of Christ in a way the world has never seen before.

I’m pretty sure I caught a girl sneaking an Instagram photo of me last night and I’m pretty sure I looked crazy.

I was sitting on the patio at Starbucks (this is where you sit if you want to have serious conversation) and telling my friend Sarah about some things going on in my life that I feel really passionately about.

I talk with my hands. I come by it naturally, my Dad is notorious for nearly knocking people out when he is talking. Fortunately I only have a five foot wing span so there’s less risk of injury involved in being in conversation with me, but there’s plenty of entertainment.

So impassioned was I that a manhunt including a helicopter with search lights was taking place right behind me and I was totally unaware. Seriously people, you can’t make this stuff up.

To the small group of women sitting just on the other side of the window *inside Starbucks it must have looked like I was giving Sarah a piece of my mind. I’m sure that I was oscillating between shaking my finger with conviction to some kind of combination of flailing arm movements. Crazy.

Later as I was getting ready for bed I was chuckling thinking about it and remembering Donald Miller’s blog post I’d read earlier in the day about the narratives we believe about ourselves that may be a lie because we don’t know the whole story. When I read the post I thought back over different situations that literally have haunted me at different points and wondered if there was anyway that I had invented narrative in those times. My exciting coffee talk with Sarah and the half of it these other women were seeing landed the plane for me on just how easy it would be to do that.

When you realize that, intentionally or not, everything you do tells a story and in most cases you don’t have a ton of control over the type of story you’re telling, it really makes you stop and consider which narratives you should actually be taking seriously.

Check out Don’s post, I really enjoyed it! And if you come across an Instagram photo of me looking enraged, I was not about to beat Sarah with anything.

*I think it’s important to mention that while most sensible women would relocate to a safer place when it becomes evident that there is a manhunt going on in your general area, Sarah and I remained in our patio seats so that we could better observe police searching vehicles with flashlights. That’s the kind of women we are. =)

I heard someone use that phrase at the Love Does conference last week and it stuck to me like glue. He was talking about being vulnerable and how leaders lay themselves bare first to open the door for others.

Everything about the Love Does conference reminded me that I am a story made up of many parts and there are some parts that I am exceptionally comfortable telling and there are others I hold close and try to think of as background noise while the scene focuses in on something else, something less personal, or less painful.

Over the past six months I have felt with increasing urgency that these other parts of my story need to step into the light and when I heard this idea about going first it was like God tapping me on the shoulder and clearing his throat encouragingly.

I guess we can consider this post my attempt to put a toe in the water…

When I was twenty-six I found myself really disillusioned with life. Nothing was working out the way I had planned and it didn’t make sense because I had always been the good girl. When everyone around me was doing other things, I was towing the line for God. I prayed, I went to church, and I worked hard to be better than my peers. It was exhausting. It felt utterly unfair that I was lonely, unsatisfied with life, and worse, everything kept going wrong.

I lost my job, I had horrible roommate trouble and I ended up having to move home. It felt particularly humiliating being the oldest and being the only one to have to move home. I didn’t know who I was or where I was going in life and I was angry that after having tried to do everything right, this is where I found myself.

Timing is everything and I was ripe for something to change, so when I met someone and he planted the seed in my head and heart that I would feel a lot better about life if I worked on my physical appearance, I seized the opportunity with a vengeance.

What began as a plan to use the time I wasn’t working to exercise and make healthier choices about food turned into nearly two years of starving myself and exercising close to 30 hours a week.

The more weight I lost the better I felt about life.

It wasn’t just about what I saw in the mirror, even though I enjoyed the compliments I got and the way people praised my hard work, for me the greatest satisfaction came in finally having something I could control, and the more I controlled it, the more satisfied I felt.

I had dropped just below 100 pounds when God used a trusted friend to bring me back to reality with the words, “Hey, you’re starting to look really scary.”

One of the reasons I’ve avoided talking about this part of my story is that I have never wanted to wave the Eating Disorder flag for myself or let it be the center stage production of my life. I’ve feared both people’s pity and their disappointment. There is so much more to my story than this one part and it’s bothered me to think anyone might get stuck here.

What I’ve learned in the aftermath, however, is that our struggles don’t find us at random. As much as we are purposed by God, our stumbling blocks are strategically chosen for us by our enemy.

This might be hard to hear, but starving yourself is not easy. It takes an extreme amount of motivation and will power. Hunger is a basic and persistent human need and to deny it for long periods of time requires unwavering determination.

There are people who would say that through an eating disorder Satan preyed on my weaknesses– insecurity, self-esteem, belonging. But what I know now is that the truth is he subverted my God-given strengths and used them against me.

Knowing that changes the picture, it changes everything about how I take each step each day. Instead of seeing myself as a helpless victim, I have learned and am learning to understand that I am a target because I am strong, I am determined and I have what it takes to fight hard. My weaknesses are nothing compared to the strengths God wove into my being and so the best way for Satan to take me out is to distract me from what God made me for, not pick at the chinks in my armor.

This part of my story has been essential to me understanding who I am and how God created me.

Do you see the strengths in your struggle? I hope you will look for them, I promise you they are there and when you recognize them it turns life upside down in the best possible way.

We all spend a lot of time thinking about what we are against.
Before I even finish typing this sentence I’ve already thought of at least ten things that I am absolutely against. Everything about our culture promotes the sense that we are responsible to know what we are against and that we need to join forces with other people who are against the same things that we are.

We draw attention to those things that we are against through boycotts, rallies, demonstrations, and blog posts. We leave the world around us in no doubt of what we don’t believe in, what we disavow, and what we reject.

We fight and we fight hard… the question is what are we fighting FOR?

In the war against all of the evil we’ve identified in the world, have we completely forgotten that there are things worth saving, worth uniting over, that there is good to uphold, and there is beauty to be seen?

What would our world look like if instead of bonding over what we are against, we stood together for good, for love, for things done right? What if we devoted our social spaces to honoring acts of kindness, to recognizing strength of character in others, to capturing moments of freedom, justice, and unconditional love?

At the end of my life I don’t want to be remembered for the list of things I was against, I want to be known for what I was for. I want give my life to pointing towards something and not steering people away. I want to be in the business of shining a light and illuminating truth, not exposing darkness and lies.

Can we live in that space? Can we use our words to speak life instead of breathing death?
What are we for?

I know. I am deceptively introverted, so I understand how much of a shock this news may come as to some of you.

While you try to recover from having your whole perception of me shaken keep reading.

As a younger person I was shy-ish. I say shy-ish because a lot of people assumed I was shy, but the truth was that I was more cautious than shy. I stepped out into the world with circumspection and moved through it doing a lot more watching than acting. There was something hidden deep inside, however, that longed for wild abandon.

It wasn’t the same as a desire to rebel– I didn’t feel the need to fight against an invisible cage placed around me by other people or circumstances. I wanted to break out of the prison cell of self. There was someone inside of me somewhere who wasn’t concerned with her reputation or how she measured up to everyone else. Buried under layers of worry about whether or not I exceeded people’s expectations and the constant drive towards perfection was a girl who was fun, who loved who she was, loved how she was made and I wanted to find her.

It was heartbreaking to admit over and over again that I had no clue how to unearth a less severe side of myself. I’m naturally a competitive and determined person, so my approach to personal change or growth has always been to white knuckle it into submission. After one inevitable failed attempt after another I learned that this tactic was paradoxical to finding freedom.

Eventually resigning myself to the belief that the carefree person I had hoped was hidden in my soul just did not exist, I finally met her in the most unlikeliest of places– A gay bar.

I was twenty-seven at the time and had come to the end of many ropes. Relationships had failed miserably, my desperate need for control was crushing me, and all of the ways I had tried so hard to live up to the standard that I believed God and everyone else had laid out before me were leaving me feeling dead inside. I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the person looking back at me. I’d had enough.

Literally and figuratively throwing caution to the wind I started going out with friends. I learned that a little liquid courage went a long way towards making me feel brave enough to face the dark side of the moon. If I couldn’t find a sense of freedom, I had decided I would settle for a sense of carelessness instead.

One fateful evening, weary of dodging the ceaseless advances of stumbling drunk members of the opposite sex, but anxious for something to do, my friend suggested we go to a gay club and dance. Up to this point dancing hadn’t ever occurred to me, the places my friends and I normally hung out were “grown up” bars where you sat around, looked pretty and drank fancy cocktails while pretending to maintain conversations. I had heard that gay clubs were a safe haven for the single straight lady looking for a place to have fun because there was little to no risk of getting hit on or propositioned in any sort of way.

Considering the way I was raised and my parents ministry I felt a tiny twinge of guilt and the hint of a sense of betrayal (which now seems ridiculous to me), but the appeal was too great and I agreed to go.

What I found there I will never forget. We stepped inside and the dance floor was crowded, the music was loud and the atmosphere was… brace yourself… joyful. It hit me like a wrecking ball– the air was light and easy to breathe with lack of judgement. People were jumping up and down and moving to the music, not only because they wanted to but because they couldn’t help themselves. Whether you were a skilled dancer or completely uncoordinated didn’t matter, everyone was welcome to cast off their labels, their insecurities, their pride and feel alive.

It was contagious. As Cher sang the words “Do you believe in life after love” to a roaring house mix I found myself, completely sober, in the middle of the dance floor flailing for all I was worth. The camaraderie between my fellow movers and shakers and I was unlike anything I had ever experienced anywhere else. These people didn’t know me, they didn’t care what I tried to live up to or how I failed, they just welcomed me in.

It felt like I was experiencing pure and unadulterated joy for the very first time in my life. Something cracked deep inside of my heart and God spoke– “This thing that you feel filling you up with a sense of wonder that is unrestrained is me. There’s nothing hidden from me, there’s no judgement in me, there are no wrong dance moves, but you can’t dance at all if you’re carrying all of your stuff, so come to me the way that you came to this dance floor.”

I love to dance.

It’s how I learned about surrender and joy.

I’m not perfect… Every day I have to remember to put my stuff down so that I can dance, but now I know that I can if I just will.

Will you have the same experience in the same kind of place? I don’t know, I can’t give you an answer for that. What I do know is that God isn’t limited in the ways he can and will speak. He is creative and he knows that sometimes what we need most is to see him in the unlikely places, not where we’re used to looking for him.